The Week’s Matthew Walther has a withering view of Tuesday’s congressional hearing on Capitol Hill sexual misconduct: “From start to finish, the proceedings were a bland, tedious exercise in the deployment of managerial professionalist BS in service of a status quo that virtually everyone in the room either approves of or would be happy to ignore.” One witness suggested that, in Walther’s words, “putting up posters full of legalese written in tiny print is the surest way of making it absolutely clear” to a member of Congress that “he should not under any circumstances be showing his penis to members of his staff or his fellow representatives.” Adds Walther: “We don’t need more ‘compliance’ training or clearer ‘guidelines’ . . . We just need people to behave with honor and decency.”

Foreign desk: Zimbabwe’s Coup Is No Big Win

If there were any kind of justice in Zimbabwe, says Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, Robert Mugabe would have been removed from power by a free and fair election” and “the country he ruined could begin the long process of recovery.” But now he’s out anyway, “and that’s a good thing.” Problem is, “the military coup that unseated him shows no signs of ending Zimbabwe’s political and economic decline.” Indeed, “this is not a moment of hope” but rather a power struggle in which Mugabe’s ex-typist wife — who’d been “been positioning to take over the country herself” — lost out to his former vice president “and all-around enforcer.” Zimbabwe “deserves better” than either of them. For now, though, “the generals have paved the way for the dictator to be replaced by one of his henchmen.”

Beauty contestants: Taking a Selfie for Peace

Despite ugly criticism from home, Iraq’s contestant in the Miss Universe beauty contest is defending a selfie she took with her Israeli counterpart, calling it a desire for peace. Yet though Sarah Idan, who now lives in the United States, stressed that the photo “does not signal support for the government of Israel,” she refused to remove it from her Instagram account, which has garnered 1,500 likes. She and Miss Israel Adar Gandelsman captioned the joint photo: “Practicing bringing world peace.”

Editors: Pentagon Long Ignored Gun Database Reporting

Under federal law, the Texas church-massacre gunman was barred from purchasing a weapon because of his 2012 court-martial conviction for assaulting his wife and her infant. But the Pentagon never reported that to the FBI database used for background checks. And the editors of USA Today note that this was not “a single record tragically falling through the cracks.” Indeed, “the Pentagon has known for years about gaping holes in the military’s system to report convictions and fingerprints to federal databases meant to keep guns out of dangerous hands.” Those holes “were originally discovered during the Clinton administration and the system remained porous while President [Barack] Obama was in office.” Yet little was done to correct things.

Conservative: Repeal the 17th Amendment

The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson has an idea for avoiding future Roy Moore debacles: repealing the 17th Amendment, which mandates that US senators be elected by popular vote instead of by state legislatures, as originally required by the Constitution. Though it “seems odd today,” that earlier provision “was crucial to the Founders’ grand design for the republic.” Congress, they felt, needed to be both national and federal: The people would be represented in the House, where representation is decided by population, and the states in the Senate, where each one gets two members. It was also a way, they felt, of “tempering the passions of the electorate” — something we probably could use today, given “the current wave of populism.”